Perfect Storm of Bad Educational Ideas

I wrote this in July 2006 after reading "The Knowledge Deficit" by Hirsch. It is still very timely. It contains direct quotes from his work.

The Infamous Four
They Sound Good But They Don’t Work
Why Johnny Can’t Read

E. D. Hirsch Jr. in his new book, The Knowledge Deficit, points out why American education is not succeeding in educating our kids well and why the achievement gap between minority and low income students is not responding to the current methods.

Hirsch calls the current situation a “perfect storm” of Bad Educational Ideas. The Four on his list include:

• Naturalism—“The reason for this state of affairs – tragic for millions of students as well as for the nation – is that an army of American educators and reading experts are fundamentally wrong in their ideas about education and especially about reading comprehension. Their well-intentioned yet mistaken views are the significant reason (more than other constantly blamed factors, even poverty) that many of our children are not attaining reading proficiency, thus crippling their later schooling. …[A] complacent faith in the benefits of nature. …reading is or should be natural.” Other names that are synonymous are romanticism, transcendentalism, progressive as in John Dewey. Caused Hirsch to write Cultural Literacy which pointed out that reading comprehension – literacy itself – depends on specific background knowledge. “The dominant ideas in American education are virtually unchallenged within the educational community. American education expertise (which is not the same as educational expertise in nations that perform better than we do) has a monolithic character in which dissent is stifled. This is because of the history of American education schools…the history of these schools, which are institutions that train almost all of the teachers and administrators who must carry out the provisions of NCLB, is the history of intellectual cloning. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the parent organism, Teachers College at Columbia University, exported professors and the romantic principles…resulting in an intellectual sameness across the nation’s education schools. Even today criticism of those fundamental ideas is hard to find in these institutions.”

• Formalism—“A lot of dead information is to be replaced by all-purpose, how-to knowledge (formalism). Naturalism and Formalism are the two principles that constitute a kind of theology that is drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism. In practice the two principles are not always compatible. …the how-to notion of reading comprehension that stresses clarifying, summarizing, questioning - will inevitably lead to drill-like activities which will be anathematized by the naturalistic principle that learning should be an engaging activity. The dominant principles of naturalism and formalism, being opposed to the systematic teaching of a great deal of information, are deadly enemies of the reading goals of NCLB. Advances in reading will depend on students gaining a great deal of information. This conflict of ideas is, then, the root cause of the impasse between the NCLB law and the schools, for the only way to improve scores in reading comprehension and to narrow the reading gap between groups is systematically to provide children with the wide-ranging, specific background knowledge they need to comprehend what they read.”

• Determinism—the belief that demographics determine ability to learn. “Determinism is nonetheless a flawed and dismal theory, which, while conveniently exculpating the schools, undermines the founding principles of democratic education.”

• Localism--"Along with the terrible trinity of naturalism, formalism, and determinism, localism deserves a dishonored place in American education. Among the wider public it may be the most powerful educational idea of all. On the surface it just implies that our state or our town will decide what should be taught in our schools. It says nothing about what those things should be, so localism is another content-free idea, and as a practical matter it powerfully reinforces an approach that is short on content. It brings liberals and conservatives together to collaborate in support of anti-content, process oriented ideas about education."

"This suspicion fed collaboration between liberals and conservatives helps explain why the process point of view has persisted despite its inability to raise achievement or attain fairness. Educationist, process ideas thrive on the liberal-conservative standoff, and our schools and school boards operate under a gentleman's agreement that unites these groups behind the process-oriented creed."

“The failure of romantic [naturalism, progressivism, constructivism, etc] ideas to improve educational achievement is an inevitable result of their scientific inadequacy and inaccuracy. Reading is not, as romantics hold, either a natural acquisition or a formal skill. But mere scientific inadequacy can be a practical irrelevance in American education. Professors, including those who teach our teachers, do not easily give up their long-asserted ideas, even under the pressure of unfavorable scientific evidence.” Thus, the professors blame society because they won’t face the lie they are telling themselves by ignoring the scientific evidence.

“Old people grow blunt; they haven’t time for slow niceties. Let me be blunt about the implication of the intellectual history I have traced…If its recommendations are followed, reading scores will rise for all groups of children, and so will scores in math and science, because, as common sense would predict, reading is strongly correlated with ability to learn in all subjects. Equally important, social justice will be served, because the reading gap between social groups will be greatly narrowed by following the …pro-knowledge recommendations.”